Rachel Worley took her first spins on West Kootenay’s highways in an old Dodge Intrepid, and it was love at first drive.
“I just loved being in there,” she says. “I loved the feeling of driving. My mom had a hard time getting me out [of the car].”
The joy of driving eventually led her to a profession that’s still relatively rare for women in West Kootenay. Worley, who works full time at Western Auto Wreckers, is Nelson’s only female tow truck driver.
While she was originally interested in getting a Class 1 license, which allows drivers to pilot semis, buses, trailers and any other large vehicles, Worley says the cost of a full-time training program was higher than she could manage. When she saw a job posting for a tow truck driver at a Salmo-based company, she decided to try that kind of professional driving instead.
For the next year, she drove a deck truck — a heavy hauler that can tow two vehicles at once. Her current job at Western requires her to spend most of her time in a wrecker (a smaller truck not much bigger than a regular one-ton pickup), but the heavier vehicle is still her favorite piece of on-the-job machinery.
Though she was the only female on staff in Salmo — and the first woman driver Western ever hired when she decided to trade up to Nelson’s larger, busier market — Worley says her gender has never been an impediment to working in the industry.
“I was hired under the premise like anybody else, as long as you can do the work and you can do it well, you can have the job,” she says.
“You have to answer the phone when it rings, you have to complete a job, you have to lift what needs to be lifted. And that’s all it ever was. I’m glad for that, that there’s never been any emphasis on the fact that I’m a girl.”
On a typical day at Western, Worley is one of three to six drivers on call, working in 24-hour shifts. She’s in charge of basic maintenance for her truck, answering phones when necessary, moving the shop’s ever-changing collection of vehicles from place to place and, of course, hauling vehicles that have run into some misfortune on the city’s roads.
“There’s so many reasons why you tow a vehicle too. It might not be a huge reason,” Worley explains. “It could be that someone lost their keys and has to take it to the locksmith. Or somebody has a flat tire and they don’t have a spare.”
While there’s a fair bit of lifting involved in preparing a vehicle to tow, she says the physical demands of the job aren’t as daunting as it may look to outsiders.
“For most of the stuff you get the truck to do the job for you,” she explains. “It’s not super heavy.”
But she wonders if the physical requirements of her work have kept some women from getting involved in the industry — and perhaps discovering they enjoy the job as much as she does.
“I don’t know if it’s just that more women don’t try,” she says. “As long as you’re physically able to do it, anybody can be trained. It’s just a matter of if you really want to do it or not.”
In the time she’s spent towing, Worley says she’s only met two other female drivers: one out of Castlegar and another who worked in Kelowna before moving to Ottawa to start her own company. But while it’s not common here, she’s heard towing has caught on with women in the United States.
“There’s a lot of women owning their own towing companies and being tow truck drivers, and I think that’s really neat,” she says. “I wish more women could get into it, get into this industry.”
And while customers are sometimes surprised to see a woman behind the wheel of the tow truck they’ve called for, she says most are also supportive of her offbeat career choice.
“They’ve always been like, ‘good for you,’” she says. “I think it’s neat. I love my job, and I just think it’s neat that other people don’t doubt me when I show up.”
Though she now spends much of her time at work behind the wheel, Worley says towing hasn’t taken the edge off her love of recreational driving. Navigating logging roads is a favorite pastime, and her other hobby, fishing, gives her plenty of reason to head for out-of-the-way lakes on roads less travelled.
And while she’s not planning to leave the world of towing, she’s still hoping to someday upgrade her license to one of the heavier classes.
“I’ve always had an interest in driving dump trucks,” she admits. “I don’t see myself doing that as a career, because I really love what I’m doing now. But I’d like the opportunity to at least try something bigger.”